>> So what do you do about your smartphone then?

It lasts longer than 18 hours. :)

>> 18 hour battery life in a typical day

Anyone else think this makes the watch useless for its target audience? I've had a lot of days that started by leaving the house at 4:30, flying to another city, working and meeting all day, going to dinner, and going out for drinks and ending up back at a hotel at 1-2am...in another time zone. With only 18 hours of time, my freshly-charged watch could be dead at 8-9pm (before we hit the bar).

CES was months ago now. Please quit the string of crappy "hey, this one time at CES" articles.

>> where 1 AU is the average distance between the Earth and sun

this

If "yes," then it's not self-driving.

>> want to recruit Linux professionals...likely to hire a candidate with Linux certification

Wait...which one do you want? Professionals or certified neophytes?

Google "Word macro virus"...

>> patch of woodland just north of Livingston, Louisiana

The most annoying part of the introduction was the fact that it made it sound like this was going on in somebody's still, rather than a highly funded research project run through nearby LSU. Also it's partial due to work in California:

>> Key design elements of LIGO came from Ronald Drever, project director at Caltech from 1979 to 1987, who, Thorne says, “has to be recognized as one of the fathers of the LIGO idea."

>> pushed into building artificial worlds because making in the real one is hampered by (indecipherable sniveling)

Take a minute to Google "Dungeons and Dragons" and you'll see how my generation did reality-avoidance.

I'd expect lots of cross-over branding crap. Look what happened to Legos: you can barely avoid the Star Wars, LOTH, Disney Princess and Marvel (and yes, even Minecraft) branded tie-ins over there.

15. Someone drops the Red Matter

16. No one can speak "whale song" in 400 years

17. Vger can't find Decker

Extreme climate change
Nuclear war
Global pandemic
Major asteroid impact
Super volcano
Ecological catastrophe
Global system catastrophe
Synthetic biology
Nanotechnology
Artificial intelligence
Future bad global governance
Unknown consequences /karmawhoring>

Kind of weak list, IMHO. For example, where is "overpopulation?"

...cause that technology is about as magical as this silly notion:

>> Could we all one day soon have virtual backups of ourselves that we can access and have new body parts 3D printed on demand?

Why does it look like a fleshlight?

>> it was simple; only two pieces to fit together

To me, the Linux experience has been based around the use of simple, command-line oriented tools that could be easily scripted together. That's the opposite of "only two pieces fit together" - just like Legos you have thousands of pieces that could fit together to make billions of different things.